Medicine Under Sail

In an age of discovery and empire building, the map of the world was drawn by those on long voyages. Their achievements had as much of an impact on world history as did the admirals' success in implementing tactics that won the battles for colonialism."--Jacket.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Long regarded as a leading authority in the sailing world, Eric Hiscock provides here a helpful reference for ocean voyaging. Illustrated with numerous photographs and maps, it ranges from tying knots to global weather patterns--the essential resource for any open water sailor.

In the Age of Sail scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea than piracy, shipwreck and all other illnesses, and its cure ranks among the greatest of military successes – yet its impact on history has mostly been ignored. Stephen Bown searches back to the earliest recorded appearance of scurvy in the sixteenth century, to the eighteenth century when the disease was at its gum-shredding, bone-snapping worst, and to the early nineteenth century, when the preventative was finally put into service. Bown introduces us to James Lind, the navy surgeon and medical detective, whose research on the disease spawned the implementation of the cure; Captain James Cook, who successfully avoided scurvy on his epic voyages; and Gilbert Blane, whose social status and charisma won over the British Navy. Scurvy is a lively recounting of how three determined individuals overcame the constraints of eighteenth-century thinking to solve the greatest medical mystery of their era.

Ordered to join the Pacific Squadron in 1854, the sloop of war Decatur sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, through the Strait of Magellan to Valparaiso, Honolulu, and Puget Sound, then on to San Francisco, Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, while serving in the Pacific until 1859, the eve of the Civil War. Historian Lorraine McConaghy presents the ship, its officers, and its crew in a vigorous, keenly rendered case study that illuminates the forces shaping America's antebellum navy and foreign policy in the Pacific, from Vancouver Island to Tierra del Fuego. One of only five ships in the squadron, the Decatur participated in numerous imperial adventures in the Far West, enforcing treaties, fighting Indians, suppressing vigilantes, and protecting commerce. With its graceful lines and towering white canvas sails, the ship patrolled the sandy border between ocean and land. Warship under Sail focuses on four episodes in the Decatur's Pacific Squadron mission: the harrowing journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Magellan; a Seattle war story that contested American treaties and settlements; participation with other squadron ships on a U.S. State Department mission to Nicaragua; and more than a year spent anchored off Panama as a hospital ship. In a period of five years, more than 300 men lived aboard ship, leaving a rich record of logbooks, medical and punishment records, correspondence, personal journals, and drawings. Lorraine McConaghy has mined these records to offer a compelling social history of a warship under sail. Her research adds immeasurably to our understanding of the lives of ordinary men at sea and American expansionism in the antebellum Pacific West.